Tuesday, 25 April 2017

Image above by Elisabeth Neudorf, form the Series Super Pussy. Sometimes we get limited by the smallness of our minds and the narrow ways in which we see definitions. If I think of landscape photography, if I google landscape photography, I come up with something bloody awful with pictures of lakes and sunflowers. Same thing happens if I google fashion photography. The most awful dross comes up. And the same thing (with one or two exceptions) happens for street photography. It's a shocker.But I love landscape in its more complex forms. It tells you something about the land and how we live it, and the best work involves touch and sound and darkness and beauty. And I love fashion when you escape the constrictions of a narrow definition. It's the same with street photography once you get away from the limited perspective so many people have, myself included.I remember going to see the Open City exhibition of street photography a few years back. It had Klein and Frank and Moriyama in there which was great but it went way beyond that to include Wolfgang Tilmanns, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Nikki S.Lee, Catherine Opie and Susan Meiselas. The criteria was location and a forward looking perspective, not a restricted view to the past. Age, gender, and ideology were secondary to being interesting and making interesting work. It felt very free and open and I loved it so much. A short while ago, there was a post on Facebook about the lack of women street photographers. I thought about this and wondered who you could include. I could think of a few people but not so many. So I put up a post on Facebook and a whole bunch of names suddenly came forward. What was interesting was the sheer range of perspectives that were being expressed. While people like Elizabeth Neudorf and Amy Romer look at the power structures of the street and how they connect to gender, class and migration, others take a more conceptual view. Still others look at community and collaboration, some are voyeuristic and then there are those with more traditional view. A lot of the time street photography is decried for having too male a perspective, for its voyeurism and lack of ethics. But there are women who have a voyeuristic approach too, and for me some of the most interesting work is in-your-face and quite confrontational. I still think a lot of people find that difficult to handle and try to limit what people can photograph due to their own gender based prescriptions of what photgraphy should be. They do it with age, and race and ideology too, and it always limits what you can photograph and what you can see. The great thing about the responses on the Facebook post was the openness, freedom and delight of the respondents. There wasn't a generic closedness about what street photography could be. Anyway, here are some of the photographers who got mentioned - it's not exhaustive (Diane Arbus and Helen Levitt aren't in there for starters). Some are classic street, some the street definition might be stretching it a bit, for some an interaction with public spaces is only one aspect of their work, but so what, who cares (not me), some are advancing photography in public spaces into new and exciting areas. And this is just a small cross section. There are fantastic women street photographers out there.And for more on women street photographers, go to Petapixel here and the Guardian here.

And that's it for now. I'm sure there are many, many more from different parts of the world. So do feel free to post additional links in the comments. Thanks to everybody who made a suggestion and apologies to anybody I missed out.

This book tells the story of Kaneyama's family. It is a story of women in the family; Her mother, two aunts and her grandmother. When Kaneyama was a boy, her grandmother was like her mother because her true mother was ill with schizophrenia.

Then Grandma died and her mother became sicker and sicker. You believe it is a professional karoke sang. She lives in the hospital where she sings and she smokes. It is very sad and the pictures are very beautiful and emotional.

When Leaves are Falling is a family album with a difference; Tells a story of her mother's illness. At first he lives in an apartment. In the end, he lives in a hospital. In the middle, eat in the restaurant, sing and she travels in the mountains of Japan with her family.

This book is a book where the mother's face is like a mask. We do not know what the mother thinks but we know she is in a different world.

From a visual point of view, it's the perfect example of the importance photography plays in the real world, and of the unpredictability of the overlapping of its different functions. Here you have press images backfiring (not through the fault of the photography. The food looks great) even though there is nothing about them that is false as long as you understand exactly what they are used for. If you think they represent any specific meal or experience, well, they don't.

And here are Rayner's notes on the differences between the images.

Spot the difference

Some readers may notice a difference between my description of the onion dish – “mostly black, like nightmares” – and the picture of it above, which is golden and rather beautiful.

There’s a reason for this.

Le Cinq would not let us photograph their food, as we usually do after I’ve reviewed, and insisted that we use press shots. This is extremely unusual. However, I did take pictures during the meal, on an iPhone 7 using the available light. And that makes things a little clearer, as you can see.

Anyway, here are Rayner's pictures of his meal doubled up with the restaurant's pictures.

There was a stand at Bristol Artists' Book Exhibition last week where you could commission a poem for a pound.

The idea was started by Amber Hsu and she is sometimes joined by Gareth Brookes. At Bristol they had a queue of poems to tap out on the Remington typewriter.

My poem choice was the smell of paper and the poem created by Hsu is quite beautiful, poignant and touches on those ineffable moments that make books such description-defying objects.

It is also an example of how something that seems quite distant is made completely accessible and desirable - qualities we don't necessarily associate with poetry. The thing is Hsu and Brookes are drawing people in - they are making poetry accessible in a multitude of ways.

This is what Hus says about One Pound Poems.

People always seem to be positing whether poetry is dying as an art form (look two examples of people asking here and here). A lot of poetry gets tucked away in rarefied, literary journals that just aren’t that accessible. Everyone says that no one’s buying poetry anymore and no one’s willing to slow down and take the necessary time for poetry’s rewards.But if this experiment has been proof of anything, it’s that people want more poetry. Seriously, they will literally stand in line and wait for it. See the pic below? That’s an actual QUEUE we had going at the Hackney Fleamarket DIY Art Market (which you should totally check out if you haven’t already, and btw if you don’t know Gareth’s comics and zines you should totally go and get each and every one of them here too because they are all amazing). We actually had to turn people away at the end of that day. Pretty good going for two random kids and a typewriter, eh?

So one week I get a poem about the smell of paper. The next week there's an article about the smell of paper in the Guardian, in this article, Can you judge a book by its odour.

This is about the odours that books have, our emotional and descriptive responses to them. and research by Cecilia Bembibre that has attached these smells to specific chemicals that date the books. Somebody has even invented a book odour wheel. This is from the text.

Audience members responded with their own sense impressions. Peter, a pensioner, said he experienced books as smelling of salt and pepper – “that dryness when you open the cupboard … with a touch of the sea”, while 46-year-old Donna confessed that she had recently bought a book for her young son partly because it “smelled of the rain”.

To conservators and historians, smell has always played an important role in assessing the origin and condition of historic books, and in working out how to look after them. “I have no vocabulary to define this, but there is a curious warm leathery smell to English parchment, unlike the sharper, cooler scent of Italian skins,” wrote the Cambridge University don and librarian Christopher de Hamel in his bestselling Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts.

But that lack of vocabulary could be about to change, thanks to a groundbreaking project by researchers at UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, who have devised a way of relating such apparently subjective descriptions directly to the chemical composition of books. In a paper published this week in the journal Heritage Science, Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlič describe how they analysed samples from an old book, picked up in a second-hand shop, and developed a “historic book odour wheel”, which connects identifiable chemicals with people’s reactions to them.

Thursday, 6 April 2017

I've had lots of cameras die on me. But the death of my Hasselblad was especially expected. These pictures heralded the end - loose light-leaking back, un-synched lens, flappy auxilliary shutter, the last rolls were a death rattle of black, blur and the ultimate Malevichian end!

Wednesday, 5 April 2017

John Myers is a somewhat ignored English photograph whose work in the Midlands in particular is, in its quiet way, epoch defining and reflective both of the New Topographics and of the working practices of the British Colour Photographers that would come in the late Seventies and early eighties.

'For Myers, the real world was Stourbridge, the “normal small English town” that has been his home for nearly 40 years, and where most of his pictures were taken. His subjects, shot using a 4X5 Gandolfi camera, were people he knew and their children, as well as the houses and roads around town. “There’s nothing particularly remarkable about where I actually ended up working and living and eventually marrying and settling down,” he said. “This is the world that the great majority of people live in.”

Myers stopped photographing in 1988 when the Stourbridge College of Art faced closure, and a lot of his time was spent “trying to save my job.” Stourbridge survived by merging with the University of Wolverhampton, but Myers never returned to photography. He says he doesn’t miss it. “I don’t believe in going back,” he said. “For me, the stuff in the mid-’70s, if it has got any kind of quality, it’s the excitement of discovery. It’s the excitement of coming across influences. I don’t think you can go back.”'

E con Google Translate per i pigri IngleseAnd With Google Translate for the Lazy English

This week I wrote a review on the book B to B by Brenda Moreno, a Mexican photographer who loved horses when she was a girl.The book tells the story of Moreno girl and her family, but also the history and the memories of the horses because Horses were her second family. The book begins with passoporto photo of Brenda when she was young. So we know the heart of the book.

Then we see his home, his family and the horses. There are old pictures that are cut and on a red background. Here we see her old family and his new family. This is the story of Mexico too.

There's a photo of one horse's death, a photo of one horse in the swimming pool, one foal in the barn. The horses are life and death, are the natural world. And his family, his mother is a bit sad. The mother sleeps and dreams while the world turns the old Mexico to New Mexico.

So, B to B is a very interesting book with many layers. I like it because the book is familiar but foreign, it is intelligent and emotional. Universal will enchant you just. We can understand the world of horses, horses are beautiful.

Monday, 3 April 2017

It's time to write another blog post. One of the many disadvantages of contracted hours teaching at multiple educational establishments is you have to jam the hours in as best you can while the goings good and on top of that do everything three times all in a rush so you have enough to live on over the summer - the economic dead zone of the zero hours contract. It's like being an out-of-sync squirrel storing your financial nuts for the winter.

The doing-things-in-triplicates comes when you have to remember 3 sets of passwords, you have to get used to negotiate 3 online learning environments, and you have to do 3 sets of online health and safety or equalities and diversity assessments.

But it has to be done. And I always quite like the equalities and diversity training. The latest one I did last week was the best I've seen (the actors really enjoyed it, especially the ones being racist and prejudiced).

One set of questions featured a scenario where a group of eastern European workers were given dodgy tasks by a racist English team leader and his sidekick Jason. Jason and his mate would sit around drinking tea and reading the paper while the Eastern Europeans cleaned the toilets, burnt themselves on nasty chemicals and generally did all the dirty work and had a nasty time (Jason pointed out this was fair enough considered they all had massive houses with swimming pools back in their countries of birth and were used to dirty work anyway). One of the questions went something like this.

Artur: "I am from Albania, Rad is from Serbia, Goran is from Croatia and Lukas is from Poland but they say we are all from the same place and Jason calls us illegals."Q: In what ways does Jason's treatment of the workers constitute racial discrimination?

So the assessment is dealing with real life situations and it's all good, especially in photography where the possibility for insensitive use of language, behaviour, and photography is apparent every week. If you're not going into difficult places, you're probably not making anything interesting. One part of teaching is to redirect students away from insensitivity - which most of the time happens due to a lack of awareness and global knowledge. Students are mortified when they are told how things will be interpreted or if they are being insensitive.

The story of Enver and friends made me think of Romain Mader's project on Ukrainian mail order brides. I first saw it when it was the feature picture for a Tate Modern show. And I must say it is one of the most annoying pictures of all time, and was supposed to be. So there's a success there. It stuck in the mind.

In the project, which is supposed to be a kind of comedy of stereotypes, Mader doesn't distinguish between different Eastern European countries - he does what Jason does, quite deliberately. Several people were uncomfortable about this at the time of the Tate show, but didn't point it out, because... well, it's Tate Modern. Surely they know what they're doing!

Then Mader won the Paul Huf award, and the objections grew. And a petition was made asking for the award to be taken back.

If I was awarding the prize there is no way I'd reconsider it even if it's a bad choice. We make bad choices all the time and you have to live with it and move on to the next choice and hope to make it better.

In fact the petition, though entirely justified - entirely, made me feel a bit bad for Mader because the problem is a big bigger than it should be and it puts him in a little spot which he doesn't deserve. I don't like the project because it does lack a certain finesse whatever anyone says, and it is just a rehashing of stereotypes with a lack of self-awareness, but it's not exactly evil.

A letter was also written which had the perspective of the equalities and diversity assessment I took earlier in the week - and it's a good perspective, which can be summed up in this article on Calvert Journal here.The merit of the project might be that it offers some kind of escapism — this isn't a sex tourist looking for love, nor is it the real Ukraine. But it's also a western photographer exploiting stereotypes about a region in which Russian lawmakers have recently decriminalised domestic violence and Polish conservative politician Janusz Korwin-Mikke has described women as “smaller, weaker, less clever”. Somehow things aren't so funny anymore.

So you've got two different ways of talking about photography working at cross purposes - one rooted in academia and theory and one rooted in a more concrete world of equalities and diversity.

It's two different worlds not finding any common ground and that's a shame. And though I have sympathy for Mader (and know that half the photography I really like is found questionable by many on all kinds of grounds) I also think a little bit of recognition as to why people found the work objectionable would be good.

That's what missing. And that's all that is being asked for.

So it's different ways of talking about work or writing about work. And sometimes people make the assumption that in this tiny, tiny corner of photography there is only one way of talking about work or thinking about work.

That one way is really serious and it is painful, it lacks soul, it ignores emotion, it has no poetry and doesn't connect to the real world. I've got a bunch of books at home I'm reading at present and god help me, it's like doing homework. Occasionally you'll get somebody who injects some life into their thoughts, but most of the time there's no pleasure involved whatsoever, it's as if the writers have tried to remove any passion or interest from the writing - which is a puzzle when you consider the work and themes they are writing about are absolutely fascinating. But still I read it and semi-satisfy some strange self-flagellating work-ethic masochism about what knowledge is while all the time dirtying myself just a little bit more

When people write about music or film or fashion, there is a different voice and a different use of language. It can be uplifting, it can be fun. We don't get that too much in photography. No, that's bollocks. You do, but not in this particular corner of photography.

Perhaps that's because often parts of the small photography world I inhabit feel guilty about pleasure. It's that Calvinism creeping in again. Yet at the same time the way that people talk about photography and look at it completely revolves around the pleasure of great story telling. It can be quite confusing - to the point where people are not sure if they're 'allowed' to like something. I've heard that this week - "we don't know what we're allowed to like". Or what they're allowed to photograph. That's how disabling it can be - no, is!

At the Format Festival in Derby which I wrote about here, the pleasure is to do both with the images and the fantastic venues. It's also to do with meeting people and eating and drinking and talking about what you liked. That's why I went to Derby at the end of a very long and busy week - to enjoy myself with lovely photography and lovely photography people. I think it's the reason most people went there.

Yet there is the idea that there is a right way of looking at an exhibition, or a book, or a project. And this is what is annoying about the response to the petition. There is the idea that there is correct understanding of the work, only one. It's infuriating, in the same way that if you don't like something you get told it's because you aren't smart enough to get it. Maybe, or maybe there's just not that much to get, or the story being told is a piece of shit. But we are all pissing in the wind and don't really have a solid clue about what we are talking about. And it is a good thing to be able to recognise that.

Pretending otherwise leads to a patronising attitude and one that you don't find quite so much in other visual arts, even those with a supposedly close family resemblance. I bought the cards here from Bristol Artist's Book Exhibition - which is all about the pleasure of the book, of paper, of printing.